This covers some of the reasons that I am running my own Mattermost server, and considering joining or hosting a Mastodon instance.
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i really liked G+, and i’m losing touch with so many people because of its demise. i feel that tech media had it in for G+ from launch, and refused to give it a chance, so of course google stopped supporting it. which sucks. but here we are. sigh.
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I’m still not over the shutdown of Reader.
Feedly is an okay RSS aggregator, but it’s not nearly as good as Reader was.
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I genuinely sympathize with losing something useful to you like that, but consider what the launch was. “You want a new google social network? Doesn’t matter, start using it now.”
I remember gmail bugging me about it constantly. And at first I was interested and considered trying it, but you couldn’t try – it promised to be an irrevocable conversion of your existing account, just trust it will be awesome. I’d also been considering signing up for YouTube at the time. And then there was a wave of complaints about how it was broken for the sake of shoving everyone into G+ – this article links Vi Hart’s (temporary) quitting as a good example. None of that was encouraging.
If you try to railroad people somewhere, you can expect them to look at it without enthusiasm. That’s not on the tech media, that’s on google for trying to force instead of lure a user base. Really, it’s the same lack of consideration as their now ending products people want, just from the other direction.
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Picassa, RIP. I <3ed you.
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i don’t know how it was any different from any other social media site, though, like FB or whatever. they want you to stay in their garden, all the time. you can’t just try any of them easily. one person’s aggressive marketing campaign is another person’s hard-sell, i get it. for me, it was no big deal – i use google, gmail, and youtube anyway, and it worked well with those (of course). i get that they had occasional security issues – that’s just to be expected everywhere eventually. oh well, it’s gone now.
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But Facebook, MySpace, Twitter… They all started their social networks from nothing. They needed lock-in to prevent from being absorbed.
Google could have taken the opportunity to make an open social network, something with a fully-functional API, so that Google is providing little more than the server, the ability to connect to other users, and a bare default interface, and everyone else builds on top of that.
Instead, Google+ just tried to be another closed social network, and, with nothing to really make it preferable to Facebook, it was doomed from day one.
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well, that’s a good point. hmmm. but if people would’ve given it a chance, i maintain that it had a LOT that made it preferable to facebook. i found lots of interesting people there, and had many good, long discussions there. of course, there were trollish asses there too, but largely my interactions there were great.
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Forcing the cross-site login was really a bad move and was directly reminiscent of everything that they had stood against regarding things like Windows forcing IE because they integrated it into the OS. In that instance, they literally became the very evil that they swore not to be.
But more on topic, I think that was before they started randomly shutting down services. What we all really need to worry about is if they shut down gmail. It’s not likely, but they could do it at any time. What percentage of the population relies on it? It’s not just it’s own thing, but if you signed up for anything else using that email address, that’s where your password resets go, so no more gmail would mean no more access to anything you signed up to since you created that gmail account (if you used it for that, which most people do).
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